What would be the Alto of today designed with hardware from 2030, not with a cheap FPGA from 2015?
What do you want to build today that is too expensive to try out ?
Virtual reality environments with good graphic. Or maybe something like microsoft hololens. Glasses which work like AR HUD and tracks your movements, your gestures and maybe voice. This requires a lot of custom hardware (microsoft developed ASICs for this to do it in realtime).
Also .. it would be awesome to port smalltalk to 3D.
It is fairly simple to you today, given that Alto exists.
It wasn't that simple for those guys in 1968, trying to imagine how a 199x computer would look like (Alan's words). That was their goal.
> What do you want to build today that is too expensive to try out ?
That is why they are called inventions and there are patents to assign to them.
Nobody knowns without doing the proper research.
It was pretty simple. I've used and programmed an Alto, back when Stanford had a few around. It was basically a reworked Data General minicomputer in a small rackmount case. 16 bit word oriented, programmable in BCPL or Mesa at the low level, Smalltalk at the higher level. The removable hard disk was the same as a DEC RK05 cartridge disk. The Ethernet interface was very simple, and coax Ethernet was electrically simple. Alan Kay referred to Ethernet as "an Alohanet with a captive ether". The CPU was microcoded, and cycles were stolen from the CPU's microcode engine to run the peripherals. None of this was pushing the state of the art. The CPU hardware was a minimum viable product.
The keyboard, mouse, and display were all new, and nicely engineered. Most of the hardware effort went into those. The keyboard had nice key switches and a massive metal casting. The display was the first good black-on-white display, with a big portrait-format screen. The original mouse wasn't that great.
That, as they say, is the $64,000 dollar question.
I sure don't know. I'm not creative enough. Do you know?
My intuition is that there is about 0.01% of the population that is visionary enough to properly answer that question.
From what I have read, the people at PARC got there by similar routes, there was one group from SDS and another from Evans & Sutherland. I'm not sure we still have the same kind of "landmarks" that will attract the right people.
You are more right than you think. The initial manufacturing cost of an Alto (adjusted for inflation) was...
http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=12000+dollars+from+1973&x...
